NHL 13 Lights the Lamp

NHL 13 from EA Sports features dozens of upgrades from last year’s game, but its most-intriguing new feature is off the virtual ice.

From even before the first face-off, it’s hard to miss the eye candy developer EA Canada added to the game, which goes on sale for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on Tuesday.The improved physics and smarter artificial intelligence also make the game better. Alone, though, they wouldn’t be enough to convince me to pay $59.99, unless I was a huge aficionado of the series or a major hockey head. I already own NHL 12, which is now selling on bargain racks for under $30 and — though it’s heresy to even suggest this — totally suitable for casual gamers who want to play a decent-looking and fun console hockey game or who don’t care too much about playing online.

When you try out NHL 13′s “GM Connected” mode, you won’t want to play any earlier version of the game. EA set up a server for reviewers to test out with each other and staff. It wasn’t up for very long, wasn’t fully functional and doesn’t really do justice to the rich descriptions of features in the reviewer’s guide the company distributed, but it gave me an exciting taste of why it is giving EA Canada the vapors.

First, forget everything you ever did with online leagues in any sports game. GM Connected blows away all others. The level of detail, depth and server power behind the mode is staggering to me. If it all works as EA promises, this is what connected gamers have been waiting for. Specifically, up to 750 players can play in one league at one time. That’s just one league. You can belong to multiple leagues, create your own league, be a commissioner of a league, general manager or just a player.

Both league-creation settings and AI settings for your team are as meticulously detailed as you want them to be. As commissioner, you set rules, such as period length, penalties and whether to turn fighting on or off. There are also advanced settings to let you tweak playoff format, tie-breakers in the playoff, CPU trades, whether there’s a waiver wire or not, whether there’s a salary cap or not and a half-dozen other options. You’re restricted to an 82-game season with playoffs, but you have control over how much playing time those games will take. If you want to really skip ahead to the playoffs for Lord Stanley’s cup, you can keep a really short window, forcing user-controlled teams to sim many games.

GM Connected lets you play other human-controlled teams or the CPU. You can also sim games, but results are not as random as in years past. NHL 13, according to the EA reviewer’s guide, lets you “build your AI,” setting strategies and tendencies for your team. Again, the level of detail is unprecedented. You can decide, for example, whether your team favors forechecking or defensive pressure, along with several other tendencies. You can also drill down to specify biases for your forward and defensive lines. You can set your carry/dump bias on offense, your shoot/cycle bias for the offensive and defensive lines and decide how often your defense pinches or holds. All this makes for a team that more closely reflects your values and strategies as a coach and GM when you want to sim a game. You can also act as your team’s coach.

Also interesting to me is the ability for 12 humans to play cooperative six-on-six online games. What this means is that each player on the virtual ice is human-controlled. I am definitely going to try that out.

Where GM Connected gets super-geeky is in the 25-year maximum length of a league and the ability of general managers to rebel, though democracy, not in-game fisticuffs, resolve disputes, EA Assistant Producer for NHL 13 Gurn Sumal told me.

“There are user-created restrictions and safeguards in place. If a commissioner lets trades go through, but shouldn’t, the GMs can vote him out. You can vote the commissioner out and yourself in,” he said.

The reason I sound almost as excited as EA about GM Connected is that, if it works smoothly as EA hopes, the publisher is selling more than just a console game with a some social media and collaboration elements. NHL 13 has the potential to make a leap from the virtual world into the real world. You are interacting with other human beings in an organized, but free-flowing and unscripted, online social setting, You have a boss who approves or strikes down trades, who moves the playing schedule forward. You have GMs interacting with each other online. But EA is promising to take it a step further this year with a companion iOS app that unhooks you from the console. I searched the Apple app store for the app, but it’s not out yet. EA said in its reviewer guide that the app will let you view player stats on your iPhone. You can also get league standings, player information, your team’s schedule and the ability to both post messages to the league’s message board and to sign free agents and trade players.

Let me spend a bit on the game’s graphics. I lack the vocabulary to explain how good the game looks, so I’ll have to trust EA when it writes things like character-shading features “filmic tone mapping of HDR lighting” and “simulation of light through skin (ears/nose).” Under the category of “ewww,” EA writes under its list of environment upgrades that there’s “light fall off from ice to nose bleeds now better simulated in all environments.” If you don’t speak game developerese and want a simple example of how much better NHL 13 looks from a year ago, the game includes both the new outdoor Winter Classic and last year’s version on the NHL 13 disc. Check them out, one after the other, and you’ll see that EA has done a great deal to make shadows and lighting more realistic. The coolest thing I saw was realistic “skate spray,” when players rapidly decelerate.

I’ll mention that there are many upgrades to NHL’s “Ultimate Team” mode and leave it at that. I toodled around in the mode for a couple of days, collecting players and trying out games. It definitely has more options than NHL 12, including the ability to challenge any other team from the leaderboard to an offline match and new bonuses that get you the player packs you want faster.

There are NHL Moments you can recreate from the previous season, as well as classic moments. EA promises updated 2012-13 moments shortly after they happen. Be a Pro mode is also in there, with a couple of new twists. You can break into a simmed game and finish playing it yourself, and if you complete certain Legends Tasks, you unlock pieces of a Wayne Gretzky interview EA conducted about what it takes to be great. He should know. The GM Brain in the game, which controls trading logic, is supposedly smarter this year.

Announcing is a tad better than last year, with both Bill Clement and Gary Thorne sounding a bit smarter and better, thanks to a few hundred lines of additional commentary. I like what EA has done in-between plays. Previously, when the whistle blew for icing or a penalty or some other reason, players would skate around aimlessly in what were clearly canned animations. For this year, EA went out and recorded actual player sequences, so now, when the whistle blows, you’ll see guys fixing their sticks, looking up at the scoreboard and doing other things hockey players really do while waiting for a faceoff. It adds continuity to the game and makes the experience smoother. It feels a bit like what EA Sports did with Madden 13, its NFL simulation, where developers realized the animations need to keep going until the next action in the game.

As for gameplay, I’m not as excited as EA is about “True Performance Skating” and “EA Sports Hockey IQ.” EA calls true performance skating “a game-changing innovation for the franchise that adds physics-driven skating and over 1,000 new animations.” What that means is fast skaters now actually skate faster than slower skaters. Skaters now have more-realistic momentum, which affects how they cut and move. for the Hockey IQ AI system, players are now supposed to be fully aware of every other player on the ice, adding to realism.

To put gameplay to the test, I played many games against the CPU, then decided to try my hand against someone from EA. The someone who offered me a game was Justin Del Giudice in the EA communications department. It’s probably more fair to say that I skated around and took notes on what Justin was saying over Xbox Live chat, getting dumped, checked and losing the puck, while he played like a Stanley Cup champion. I scored the first goal with my Islanders in the first period, but his Toronto Maple Leafs scored seven unanswered goals over the three periods, with Justin, all the while, detailing the great moves he was using to kick my keester. One great move this year is the ability to skate backwards, which you do on the Xbox by pulling and holding the left trigger. It’s easier to protect the puck sometimes. I did notice that the smarter AI means it’s a lot harder to pass across the ice and there’s a lot more board work than in previous versions. Also, the ability to chop the puck and dump it and beat the defensive player are in the game, and it feels more like real hockey.

With all the AI and graphics additions, NHL 13 is a more-than-worthy successor to last year’s game. Add in the new GM Connected mode and you’ve got a game that has real potential for the kind of deep engagement by players every developer wants. And props to EA for spending wads of cash improving a game that has no real competition. That’s one lament I have, with rival developer 2K Sports having left the ice wide open a couple of years ago. I know one game tends to reign supreme in a genre and that it’s hard to keep up a game franchise, but as good as EA’s NHL series is, I think hockey simulations would be better off with more competition.